And now, he has announced a $200-Million Global Initiative for Spinal Cord Research.  Here is the article below from the Province.

On the 25th anniversary of his historic world tour, Rick Hansen has announced a $200-million global initiative to raise funds for spinal-cord research.

Canada’s Man in Motion on Sunday announced the creation of the Rick Hansen Institute, which is intended to connect people and countries from around the world and help them make contributions toward spinal-cord research and care.

The Rick Hansen Foundation is launching a $200-million 25th anniversary campaign to generate resources for the institute and other innovations that support its cause.

“Just as I started out on a journey 25 years ago today, the institute is now poised to begin its journey,” Hansen said in a statement.

“We are committed to working with RHI as it gains momentum to connect with the world and realize its goals of minimizing disability, maximizing quality of life and finding a cure for (spinal-cord injury).”

Also on Sunday, the B.C government announced a $25-million donation to accelerate the search for a cure for spinal cord injury.

B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell made the announcement as Hansen marked the anniversary of the start of his Man in Motion World Tour, which also coincided with the last day of the 2010 Paralympics in Vancouver.

“Throughout the Games, athletes with physical disabilities showed the world what they can do, and this $25 million will help others with disabilities succeed against the odds,” Campbell said in a news release.

Beginning in March 1985 in Vancouver, Hansen crossed the globe by wheelchair to raise money for spinal-cord research.

Over 26 months, Hansen travelled more than 40,000 kilometres through 34 countries on four continents and raised more than $26 million.

“There has been so much progress in this field since I embarked on my Man in Motion world tour 25 years ago,” said Hansen. “I can’t think of a better way to celebrate our successes and prepare for the future. This will help us launch our global institute and position us to take on what will be our greatest challenge yet.”

It was interesting for me, I went three times during the past couple weeks.

Once I was asked “would you like to try our premium roast coffee free today?” how polite! I said yes please!

Once I wasn’t asked at all. Which suited me fine as coffee was the last thing I wanted.

And the third time I was asked “what can I get you to go with your free coffee?” Apparently I didn’t have a choice! I was getting this coffee! I didn’t drink it, I take my coffee with sugar and cream and wasn’t even offered either of them. Regardless, I still didn’t really want coffee that time so I didn’t push it.

I have two coffee shops, and I am not a huge coffee drinker, probably because I’m always surrounded by it.

I wish I could give away free coffee to everyone who walked in the door, it would be a great marketing ploy if you could handle the cost of it. Sadly, my shops are too small to take a hit like that

Anyone else enjoy the free coffee from McDonalds?

It seems everyone knows the house, it also seems like nobody lives there.  Its hedge isn’t maintained that well, and there is often an old looking Grumman Truck parked in the driveway.

I did a simple search, and was intrigued by an article on it that was written a couple years ago.  Its got quite the history!

Article from Canada.com

Character homes are the hottest item in Vancouver’s hot housing market. And there may not be a home in Vancouver that has more character than Casa Mia, the legendary mansion at 1920 Southwest Marine Drive.

Generations of Vancouverites have driven by its walled grounds to sneak a peek at the elegant Spanish Revival home through its gates.

Alas, precious few people have ever been able to see the inside. But recently it went up for sale for $12 million, and we got a tour from realtor Manyee Lui.

It’s quite the place, with eight bedrooms, eight bathrooms and so many fireplaces I lost count (I think there are nine). It was built in 1932 for George Reifel, a liquor magnate and rum runner during Prohibition who opened the Commodore Ballroom around the same time. Believe it or not, Casa Mia is actually bigger than the Commodore — it’s got 20,782 square feet of space, as opposed to the Commodore’s 18,000 sq. ft.

Casa Mia has its own ballroom in the basement, complete with a sprung dance floor, men’s and women’s washrooms and a stage. It got a lot of use in the 1940s, when Reifel’s jazz-loving son George Jr. would bring home jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Count Basie for late-night parties.

“They played the clubs in Vancouver, but they couldn’t stay in a [high-class] hotel or frequent places because of their colour, so they’d come to our place,” recalls Jane Reifel, 69, one of George Reifel’s three children.

“They wouldn’t sleep there, but they might as well have, because the party lasted all night. I would go down the hall and bump into Dizzy Gillespie. They knew me, I was the little kid. My brother just kept telling me to get lost. Well, there were lots of places to get lost in Casa Mia, I can tell you.”

The down side of having all those parties was that it was hard to sleep.

“The most amusing thing was the vibration of the noise, the drums and trumpets and everything,” Reifel says. “The maids would have to go around the house the following morning and straighten all the pictures, because they were all crooked.”

The Casa Mia ballroom was done in the art deco style, and is virtually unchanged. The walls are golden, and there are subtle deco bas relief sculptures on the walls. The bathrooms are simply dazzling — the walls in the men’s washroom are painted black, and are decorated with a golden Indian chief shooting a golden arrow at a golden stag.

Originally, though, the ballroom was silver, not gold.

“I was always told it was done in silver leaf,” Reifel says. “It came in little blocks, maybe three-inch squares, and each square had to be put in by hand. I guess it turned with age.”

Visitors to the Casa Mia ballroom could get a drink from a small, wood-paneled lounge with a lovely curved bar. It’s completely deco, down to the ceiling fixture and windows, and adjoins a billiards room with a full-size pool table.

On to the outside, which was designed by architect Ross Lort in a Spanish colonial revival style that was popular on the west coast in the 1920s and 30s.

“If you go to Beverly Hills, there’s all sorts of homes that are similar looking,” Reifel says.

The front entrance is covered by a stylish arched porte-cochere. Inside, you’re greeted by a stunning entrance hall with a dramatic vaulted ceiling that enhances the castle-like feel of the house. It seems to go on forever, gently curving from one end of the house to the other. In the middle is the grand staircase, another gently curving marvel that swoops around a two-storey high rotunda.

At the top is a coffered Elizabethan ceiling, which includes small portraits of people, presumably from the Elizabethan era. One seems to be of Queen Elizabeth I, another of Shakespeare, but Reifel admits she has no idea who they are.

“I haven’t a clue,” she says with a laugh. “It’s Dizzy Gillespie, for all I know.”

The rotunda is lit by an amazing five-foot-tall chandelier that blends the art deco and arts and crafts styles. The house is brimming with similar chandeliers: some have a medieval castle look, particularly the circular chandeliers in the family room.

It’s located to the left of the front entrance, and was originally a drawing room or library. It has two-toned wood paneled walls and beautiful arched windows, and like all the main rooms is the size of a condo (almost 700 sq. ft.). The intricately carved fireplace mantel bears the name MacLean, after a doctor who owned the house in the late 1960s. The elaborate carvings in the home were done or overseen by George Laidler, a top-notch local craftsman who also designed furniture for the home.

Off the drawing room is a sun room, featuring large windows that provide a lovely view of the Fraser River and beyond. It’s an incredibly bright space, the better to showcase the beautiful Spanish tiling in the room’s fountain (which is currently filled with plants). A paneled glass ceiling gives it a bit of a greenhouse vibe.

The stately dining room down the hall, on the other hand, is quite dark, the result of floor-to-ceiling rosewood paneling. It’s big enough for a dining table for 10, and comes with a pair of built-in glass cabinets that flank the fireplace.

The living room is done up in cream-coloured walls and carpet, and feels very French and mansion-like. A white piano sits amid a curved alcove with a quintet of arched windows, and the room’s crystal chandelier wouldn’t look out of place at Versailles.

The house has more curves than the Sea to Sky Highway. The breakfast room is circular, and opens on to the backyard pool and finely sculpted grounds, which are perched at the top of a hill to make for a better view. The grounds used to go down all the way to the Fraser River, but the lower part was developed into housing and today’s Casa Mia owner has to settle for a mere 65,592 sq. ft. lot.

The upstairs is quite ingeniously split into two sections, one for the parents, one for the kids. There are four large bedrooms, each with its own bath. The master bathroom has the most marble (quarries-full), but the girl’s bathroom is the most striking, with a curved wall, a powder blue ceiling, a melon-coloured wall and a light blue tub that rises in tiers, like an altar.

There is a small but elegant wood-paneled library and office on the second floor with built-in shelving. It isn’t original — in the old days, this was part of the servant’s quarters.

The real showpiece is up in the third floor tower. Originally a storage space, when Jane Reifel was born in 1938 her dad brought some artists up from Walt Disney’s studios in California to remake it into “Dopey’s Room,” a playroom featuring murals of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Bringing artists 1,800 kilometres to paint a child’s playroom shows how George Reifel spared no expense on his home. You could go on forever about all the house’s built-ins and detailing. The rug in the front hall was custom-made and imported from Czechoslovakia, there is a small bar at the end of the front hallway, and there is a walk-in vault in the basement.

Today the vault is a wine cellar, but originally it was where the family would park their valuables, sometimes via a secret compartment upstairs.

“Quite often my parents would come home after a party and my mother had her jewels on,” Reifel relates.

“They didn’t want to go downstairs and open up the vault, which was quite a complicated affair. There was a grille on the wall in the drawing room, and you could take that little grille off and she would put her jewels in a little bag and drop them down and they would go into the vault downstairs.”

Not surprisingly, it took a sizable staff to run Casa Mia.

“There was a cook, an upstairs maid, downstairs maid, two gardeners, and a handyman,” Reifel recounts. “Someone came in once a week to wind the clocks.”

She laughs. “Just normal living.”

One of house’s enduring legends turns out to be a myth. George’s brother Harry built his own Spanish Revival/art deco mansion, Rio Vista, up the street at 2170 Southwest Marine. People have long speculated that there was a secret tunnel between the two homes, where the Reifel brothers would supposedly store the booze they were exporting to the U.S.

But Reifel says it doesn’t exist.

“I’ve heard that rumour all my life, but there was never a tunnel,” she says.

The cost of the house in 1932 is unknown, but given Casa Mia’s size and detailing, it would have been a fortune, even in the Depression. George Reifel evidently could afford it. At one point he pulled up to the house during construction, spotted architect Lort and handed him a $1,000 bill that he peeled off a bankroll. Lort had never seen a $1,000 bill before — he took it home and hid it under the bedroom carpet until he could deposit it in the bank.

George Reifel died in 1958, and his wife sold the house in the late 1960s to Ross MacLean. Nelson Skalbania owned it for a while in the 1980s, and the house has been extensively renovated and updated twice. In 1998, it was put on the market for $20 million, but the house went into foreclosure and sold for $4.2 million in 2000. A year later it was sold again for $5 million.

Now it’s on the market for $12 million. Realtor Lui argues that in Vancouver’s high-end real estate market, it’s almost a bargain: There are at least 10 houses or condos currently on the market that cost more.

“An $18 million penthouse just sold in Coal Harbour,” Lui said.

“This is a huge mansion with all its history, and has much to offer. This house is a piece of art. You can see the workmanship, and the architectural details. It’s just incredible. I don’t think right now someone could build something like it.”

Well, they might — if they were Bill Gates.

It has been 7 years since Vancouver/Whistler was awarded the Olympics.  The Olympics are now just around the corner, and we are trying to finish the city off in order to get ready to be displayed on the world stage.

Buzz Bishop was excited as he took in the Olympic Flames relay as it ran through Calgary.

Soon it will be here!

Here is a great local site that has information on all the events and on goings of the happenings in the city, as well as updates and stories on the athletes.

It is quite nice, writing this post, I am looking out over the water, Stanley Park, and the North Shore mountains. However, standing while using the computer is not so ideal. But its handy if you are in the area and need to check something online!

Watch a video here to learn what’s happening.

Here is a copy of an email I got with information on various protests that are happening across Canada.

This email is to inform you of “A National Day of Action to save CBC Radio 2 and the CBC Radio Orchestra” taking place on April 11 in major cities across Canada, mainly in front of CBC buildings. There are over 15,000 Canadians involved in this grassroots movement.

Please relay Friday’s nationwide rally information to your groups, students, friends, family, fellow musicians, and whomever you think is interested. Forward this email to your contacts too.

They will be short, but very energetic rallies. Bring signs and songs! Tell your local media!

Full list of rallies happening in sync across Canada on Friday April 11

Victoria
9am Pacific: Victoria: 1025 Pandora Avenue

Vancouver

9am Pacific: Vancouver: 775 Cambie Street

Calgary

10am Mountain: Calgary: 1724 Westmount Blvd. NW

Edmonton

10am Mountain: Edmonton: 23 Edmonton City Centre, 10062-102nd Avenue

Saskatoon

10am Sask: Saskatoon: CBC 144 2nd Ave South

Regina

10am Sask: Regina: 2440 Broad Street

Winnipeg

11am Central: Winnipeg: 541 Portage Avenue

Toronto

12pm Eastern: Toronto: 250 Front Street West

London

12pm Eastern: London, ON: 208 Piccadilly Street

Ottawa

12pm Eastern: Ottawa: 181 Queen Street, Ottawa - Meeting at Sparks Street entrance

Montreal

12pm Eastern: Montreal: 1400 Rene Levesque East

Saint John

1pm Atlantic: Saint John: 560 Main Street

Halifax

1pm Atlantic: Halifax: 1601 South Park

St John

1pm AST: Saint John: 560 Main Street

Newfoundland

1:30pm Newfoundland: St John’s: 25 Henry Street

For more rally details, please visit one of these websites:
http://michaelvincent.ca/Newsblog/?p=71
http://savecbcorchestra.com/2008/04/05/cbc-national-day-of-action/
For more information on the movement, please visit composer John Oliver’s comprehensive site:
http://standonguardforcbcradio.earsay.com/?cat=5

Grouse may not be the best of the local mountains, but it is accessible, and for this price, it’s a good deal.  At $47 for a days pass, you have to go up 7 times over the next year and a bit to make it worth your money. Currently there is still about 500cm of snow up there, so lots of boarding and skiing left in this season!!

Check it out on the Grouse Mountain Website.

The deal with Coca-Cola, inked in 1995, was the first of its kind in Canada, and guaranteed $8.5 million to the university over 10 years in exchange for exclusivity. In 2005, the exclusive contract was extended another two years, until August 2007.

The extension came with no additional funding after UBC students failed to live up to a clause guaranteeing the sale of 33.6 million cans or bottles over the first 10 years — a projection based on similar deals on U.S. campuses. By 2005, UBC students had consumed just over 17 million bottles — nearly six-million litres of Coke products.

Coca-Cola halted its funding, including $160,000 per year paid directly to the students’ Alma Mater Society.

Read the full article at Canada.com

I got an email from John asking for my address, and when he found out that I was in the same city as him, he invited me out to the weekly Dot Com Pho so that he could hand the shirt to me in person. Of course I accepted the invitation and joined them.

Pho Lan was quite busy today, and we had to wait a while before we got a table, but when we did get a table, the food was good.  Before we ordered, however, I played a bit of musical chairs with John, trying to find the best seating arrangement to keep Sally happy.  Sally, who had been having a rough morning from random shouts of “Sally Chow Dot Com!!” from Paul of www.pualmudhar.com, was happy with our seating arrangement, and settled down to chew on the table, which apparently was quite tasty!!

Well, I got my FlippingRich.com T-Shirt, (which I will take a picture of when I get a chance) and got to meet some bloggers face to face.

I learned a lot this afternoon, from hearing John, Greg, and Paul chatting, and hope I can continue to learn and put some of it to use so that I can make money online.   <–just had to throw that one in there for John!!